I believe they mean dedicated hardware..... NVidia had their chips setup so stuff like CUDA and PhysX could happen without and real CPU degredation or GPU degredation if you offloaded it to a dedicated card for PhysX or dedicated some cores of the main GPU to handle that task

Yes, i am aware of its software side on the cpu. But it's the hardware side that makes the real difference.

Many have argued if it were properly optimized on the CPU side it would be hardly any difference at all.http://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/Although that analysis isn't relevant to the newer versions of PhysX (especially 3.x) it still points out not everything is as NV would have you believe.

The way I understand it is that PhysX uses ancient code to run on Nvidia GPUs, purposefully done so that other cards cannot obtain the same performance benefit. At some point ATI drivers got hacked to fully support PhysX but it was blocked by Nvidia.

NVidia kinda screwed themselves in the nextgen console markets..... of course that all started with them suing Microsoft over the first xbox that they did have their chips in......

Microsoft sued Nvidia because Microsoft didn't have in the contract to re-negotiate price from nvidia for the xbox at latter time as parts got cheaper, Microsoft (per contract) was paying full price the entire time. Microsoft was kinda asleep at the wheel on that one.

PhysX has been supported on the previous consoles as well as the PC using NV or AMD cards, it'd be stranger if it didn't support it.

Yeah but the old consoles had fixed pixel and vertex shaders and didn't have the capability for hardware accelerated Physx, the next gen consoles have GPGPU functionality, I was under the impression that it would be hardware accelerated on the new ones.